Cloudera Fast Forward Labs is a machine intelligence research company.

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Highlights of 2018

Dec 18 2018

We end 2018 with a round-up of some of the research, talks, sci-fi, visualizations/art, and a grab bag of other stuff we found particularly interesting, enjoyable, or influential this year (and we’re going to be a bit fuzzy about the definition of “this year”)!

Research

“The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers” (great title!) by Joseph Wright of Derby, now in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby, UK (Wikipedia)

At NIPS in December 2017, Ali Rahimi (and Ben Recht) delivered an address that asserted that modern deep learning is more like alchemy than science. We won’t attempt to paraphrase their short talk, but many of us found it compelling, and it’s certainly worth watching or reading. This lead to much discussion in the deep learning community, and the appearance of a subdiscipline that treats deep learning as an observational science (see e.g. How AI Training Scales and How does batch normalization help optimization?).

Talks

Ex-Clouderan Josh Wills’s ten minute talk on Visibility and Monitoring for Machine Learning Models was our favorite talk of 2018. The highlight of the talk was the koan-like “You should deploy [a model] never or prepare to deploy it over and over and over and over and over again, repeatedly forever, ad infinitum”.

Highlighting a talk from 2015 feels a little like cheating, but in a year that saw the implementation of the GDPR, and our own research into federated learning, we rewatched Maciej Ceglowski’s 2015 Strata keynote Haunted by Data. His “don’t collect it, don’t store it, don’t keep it” takeaways feel like better advice than ever. Suresh Venkatasubramanian’s 2018 blog post on regulation of the tech industry vs ethical education is an interesting addendum to Ceglowski’s talk.

But Marco Klingeman’s explorations of the landscapes and fauna of BigGAN were the most successful AI-insipred art (and scifi!) we saw in 2018.

Everything else

Published in 1986, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is perhaps not as cutting edge as some of the other things on this list. But we found it interesting for two reasons: first, it’s an interesting story about the management of research in a non-academic context, which is a topic we can’t get enough of at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs. And second, it’s a sobering look at the way researchers attempt (and in many cases fail) to grasp and control the impact of their inventions. The relevance to machine learning research is obvious.

Our favorite periodical was (and is!) Logic. If you’re a follower of Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, you’ll certainly enjoy this interview with an anonymous data scientist from their 2017 debut issue, but everything they’ve published since has been equally worthwhile, and relevant to anyone working in tech.